Dalloz may have been lucky. Three days after his meeting at Chez Francis, Delestraint was arrested emerging from another Métro station, La Muette, on his way to a meeting with another Resistance leader. He was handed over to the ‘Butcher of Lyon’, Klaus Barbie of the Gestapo, and interrogated for more than fifty no doubt terrible hours, before being sent, as a Nacht und Nebel* prisoner, to Natzweiller-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace. He was shot in Dachau three weeks before the German surrender in 1945.
On 18 June, a message from Jean Moulin written before Delestraint’s arrest arrived in London. Moulin’s report warned: ‘the safety of the Vercors has been compromised. Many arrests have taken place owing to indiscretions committed by some of them [the leaders of the Vercors]. The Commander of the Groups [Le Ray] and his Chief of Staff [Prévost] have had to go into hiding and the Vercors must therefore be left for the moment and reconstituted later … No one is to take to the maquis until further orders. All direct wireless communications between the Vercors and London is to cease.’ Moulin’s decision to ‘put the Vercors to sleep’ was a wise one, for by now a wave of Gestapo arrests was sweeping the whole of France, north and south.
Despite these events, a meeting of the Directing Committee for the whole of the southern zone, chaired by Moulin himself, was held as planned on 21 June in the outskirts of Lyon. The location was betrayed and in a Gestapo swoop Moulin, together with seven other key Resistance leaders, was seized. Moulin was handed over to Klaus Barbie and tortured to death.
The leadership and structure of the Resistance in southern France now lay in ruins. It was not just the Vercors that had been decapitated. Similar operations had taken place in Isère, the Haute-Savoie and the Alpes-Maritimes. A British Cabinet paper of the day estimated that ‘fifteen principals and several hundred subordinates of the Fighting French organisation were arrested’ in the Gestapo swoops. An SOE paper quoting a secret French source put the figure much higher: ‘some three thousand members of resistance groups were rounded up and put in prison by the Germans, the majority being in Fresnes [the notorious Gestapo prison in Paris]’.
One element, however, made the Vercors different from all others affected. While the Resistance structures on the plateau could be rebuilt, the crucial connection between Plan Montagnards and those at the very top of the Free French leadership, which had given the Vercors a prime position in French plans for the liberation of southern France, had been irretrievably broken.
* Another nickname for the Italian troops – perhaps a corruption of ‘les Chiantis’.
* Literally ‘Night and fog’. It meant he was allowed no contact with the outside world whatsoever. The purpose was to make people completely disappear so that no one knew their whereabouts or their fate.
8
RETREAT, RETRENCHMENT AND RECONSTRUCTION
For Alain Le Ray and Jean Prévost, standing now almost alone amid the wreckage of the Vercors Resistance, the first and most pressing problem was money and how to rebuild their organization. Le Ray managed to make contact with one of the few members of the Moulin organization in Lyon who had survived the summer purges and who was able to provide enough money to cover the plateau’s immediate needs. His next task was to try to make contact with those who had survived the May arrests. Pierre Dalloz, with Delestraint’s last words instructing him to go to London ringing in his ears, had already set out on what would be a long and hazardous odyssey out of France.
Eugène Chavant, however, seemed to have vanished. In fact Chavant, who had first taken refuge in the countryside outside Grenoble, soon decided he was safer with trusted friends in the city, one of whom ran the Perrin sports shop in the Place des Postes. One day, quite by chance it seems, Chavant spotted a young, impressive-looking man buying fishing tackle and asked who he was. He was told that the man was an Army officer connected with the Resistance. A meeting was arranged at which a personal bond was immediately established between the two. The forty-nine-year-old Chavant, whose socialist background made him instinctively suspicious of the military and their right-wing ways, found in Le Ray, thirty-two at the time, an energetic and politically sensitive partner. For his part, Le Ray, who had an understanding of the importance of close politico-military cooperation which was unusual for French officers of the day, saw the older man as a wise counsellor and effective political operator. A close working relationship was quickly established.
At the end of June a meeting of key leaders in the Vercors region was held at the Château de Murinais under the western edge of the plateau. Its purpose was to re-establish a functional organization in place of the one which had been destroyed by the May arrests. A second Combat Committee made up of five men and two women was created under the overall control of Eugène Chavant (now increasingly referred to as le Patron). The two military representatives on the Committee were Alain Le Ray and one of his lieutenants, Roland Costa de Beauregard.
Though there would be changes to the personnel at the top, this second Vercors Combat Committee, known throughout the Resistance simply as the ‘Organisation Vercors’, would form the basic structure responsible for the direction of all Resistance operations on the Vercors right through to the end of the war. It did not, however, have either the attention of the Free French leadership in London or the direct communication with them that its predecessor had enjoyed.
To start with, Chavant himself stayed in Grenoble, making regular visits to the plateau on the tram to Saint-Nizier and Villard. But in September he moved to take up permanent residence at Saint-Martin on the Vercors itself. By the end of the year effective civilian control of almost all Resistance activities on the Vercors had been established, with Chavant presiding over two administrative sub-units, one covering the northern and the other the southern half of the plateau. Given that this was all done under the noses of a seemingly alert enemy, Chavant’s organization was astonishingly comprehensive. It incorporated the postal and telecoms services in the area, the co-ordination of friendly Gendarme units where these existed, the setting up of a system of ‘sentinels’ linked by phone and courier, the direction of the plateau’s hydroelectric generating plants and a system of motorcycle couriers based at the western edge of the plateau at Saint-Nazaire-en-Royans, who were ready round the clock to carry messages and alert the plateau of impending danger.
Alain Le Ray, replicating Chavant’s civilian structure, split his military ‘command’ in two as well, appointing Costa de Beauregard as commander of the north and another of his officers the south. Over the summer months and into the early autumn, Le Ray concentrated on reorganizing, training and, as far as he could, arming the Vercors camps, always ensuring that everything he did was coordinated with Chavant and his civilian partners. Far from lazing around in ‘holiday camps’, most of the Vercors réfractaires – when they weren’t out in the fields helping to get in the harvest – spent this summer on forced marches, on learning to live off the land and on repeated military manoeuvres under the direction of professional military officers who had by now been appointed to command each of the camps on the plateau.
Le Ray himself embarked on a tireless round of the camps, checking on their security, seeing to their needs and instructing them about their role and importance. A flavour of these events is given in an account of Le Ray’s visit to the Vercors’ first camp, the Ferme d’Ambel. After a dinner sitting, quiet and unannounced, among the réfractaires around the rough wooden tables of Ambel’s